In 2020, as the Covid pandemic raged, Sally Ours Kern and her husband Stephen retreated to their home and yard. Because Stephen had health issues that put him at risk before vaccines became available, the couple spent much of their self-imposed quarantine re-imagining their back yard.

Sally wanted an “immersive” garden of shrub, understory, and canopy tree layers that would feed and host birds. Stephen wanted a garden “anchored by fire and water”—firepit and hot tub.

Sally read scores of landscaping books, including The Living Landscape by Rick Darke and Doug Tallamy, and Darke’s The American Woodland Garden. These books showed that a garden abundant with native perennials, shrubs, and trees—especially those attractive to pollinator insects and birds—could make an appealing design.

Clearly and first, the thick stand of bamboo all along one edge of their back yard had to go. A contractor arrived in December to rip out the bamboo. Next a patio partially surrounded by river birch, red chokeberries, and ferns was installed—complete with firepit.

By spring 2023, the Covid threat had receded, but the backyard transformation continued. In another corner, invasive Asian bush honeysuckles the size of small trees encroached on a mature and charismatic hemlock tree.

They were removed, and an American hop-hornbeam, hackberry, and Nuttall’s oak were planted, along with shrubs.

Today, a path to the hemlock winds from the edge of the reduced lawn through a shrub layer of Virginia sweetspire, summersweet, spicebush, fothergilla, and southern bayberry. Along the edge are perennials and grasses: beardtongue, mountain mint, white wood aster, switchgrass, and purple lovegrass.

Additional plantings ornament other spots: a pagoda dogwood by the back fence and Christmas ferns to provide winter greenery. A hedge of winterberries and highbush blueberries screens the saltwater hot tub from the neighboring yard.

The back yard is now an oasis in all seasons. It all started, as Sally said, “by looking out the window and deciding what we wanted to see.”

–Meg Voorhes